Have been using one of these Advance Task Killer thingies to kill running apps on my HTC phone for the past month or so but wasn't sure of the relative merits of it's ability to:
a) Save battery power
b) Optimize memory usage
so decided to "kill" the task killer and uninstall it to see what the difference was.
I know lots of people have a differing view on these but must say that I'm quite surprised by the results, battery life seems quite a bit less but there doesn't seem to be any difference in running apps slowing down the phone.
Any views?
the type that run all the time (E.g. Advanced Task Killer) are useless or worse.
the type which reconfigure Android's built in task killer ( E.g. Autokiller Memory) can be useful in some circumstances (e.g. on the Samsung Galaxy S, Samsung have sold the phone with stupid defaults which cause it to get very slow after a few hundred hours of uptime).
cheers Retro - i'll give that a blast.
BTW says something about needs phone rooting for all features to work, does it make big difference?
on the Samsung Galaxy S, Samsung have sold the phone with stupid defaults which cause it to get very slow after a few hundred hours of uptime
explain please
What you need there, apparently, is the 'one click lag fix' or some such. It's well documented on Android Forums.
Task killers are snake oil - Android does its own memory management to close background tasks as required. Don't bother.
Cougar - Member
What you need there, apparently, is the 'one click lag fix' or some such. It's well documented on Android Forums.
Nope, two different bugs on the Galaxy S.
Bug 1: Slow FS. Everytime a fsync() is called, it takes a loooong time and during this period all the processes are stuck in IOWAIT (effectively frozen). This can be remedied to an extent using 'one click lag fix', as a loopback EXT2/EXT4 filesystem is mounted over the top of the slow RFS one, and thus we don;t get hit by the slow RFS/MOVINand fsyncs.
More on this here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=799931
Bug 2: Phone gets VERY slow (black screens for up to a minute) when switching between, opening new apps even if they are doing little or no I/O. This is fixed by using Autokiller Memory. There is a setting somewhere which Android uses to decide when to evict processes from memory. This is set incorrectly by default on the Galaxy S. Using Autokiller Memory set to strict eliminates this problem entirely. It is NOT the same as using Advanced Task Killer.
rs - Member
explain please
See Bug 2, above.
Task killers are snake oil - Android does its own memory management to close background tasks as required. Don't bother.
Yes, that should be the case, but it isn't (at least on the Galaxy S).
philsimm - Member
cheers Retro - i'll give that a blast.BTW says something about needs phone rooting for all features to work, does it make big difference?
Don't know, but I am. I personally wouldn't bother unless you are having problems, apps running on android really isn't a problem, it's designed to do so and you risk killing apps which aren't meant to be.
This is just a mirror of the Windoze vs Mac OS X competition.
Android - plenty of adaptability, but you need to install all sort of shitty little applications to keep your phone working properly.
Apple - simple, just works* without all the odds and sods
*You may need a case/bumper to allow you to make actual calls in some instances 😆
Whe I got my Desire,I installed a task killer and a battery monitor. After reading up on it, I took them out to see if it made any difference. I [i]think[/i] the battery lasts better without them, but TBH it's so hard to tell....